Thomas Stovicek : the Egg


	November 2004 to April 2005 . Ivrea, Italy Overview The Egg is a project that looks at the short-term negotiations of time between events. By using a physical device, users have an ambient notification of when their next event is. It allows them to communicate to people in their next meeting when they are about to be late. It's the bridge between the now, and the very very soon. The egg was part of an Applied Dream project done at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea by Jennifer Bove, Thomas Stovicek and Nicholas Zambetti.with faculty advisor Neil Churcher. The goal of the workshop was to create design concepts on the topic of a calendaring system for the Institute. The Egg was one of two proposals developed by our team. The problem we tried to tackle was that of last minute event changes. How do people negotiate being late? How can you communicate last minute changes to other people easily? Since the institute is a place where there are lots of informal meetings, we found it would be useful to have some was of managing and communicating tiny shifts in you schedule. What we found was a model of time that we called "eggtime" for managing these last minute changes. The Egg is the scheduling device used to communicate our concept of eggtime and last minute scheduling. The Egg is a wireless device people carry with them. The user receives a visualization of their current time commitments and also a non-intrusive way to tell others that they will be slightly late. Photo by Simone Muscolino

	How it works The Egg gets a person's calendar information over the network and displays the time remaining to the next meeting in the form of levels of light. When the light in the Egg is emptied, it is time for the next meeting. When a person needs more time (because they are running late, stuck in traffic or just want to stop and get a coffee) the person would shake their egg and tip it upside down, much like an hour glass. The egg would slowly fill with light, until the person tips it back right side up. The amount of light represents how much time they need to get to their next event. This change is noted in the system and a message is sent to those people in the person's next meeting informing them they will be late. Their eggs blink to convey the message. In order to find out how late, the recipient of a lateness notification would hold down a button on the top of the egg to switch the mode and see how late the other person will be. To accept the time change, and make it your own, the user would simply shake the egg while the button is held down to synchronize their time with the person who is late.

	The Project Our deliverables for the original workshop were a presentation that included flash based scenarios and a rough prototype of a egg to demonstrate and test the interaction of the tipping and adding time (it was a rather large egg). Since the Applied Dream, our team worked further on the Egg concept. We have begun to consider the more complex aspects of eggtime and made a more refined model/prototype of the egg device. Milan 2005 The updated Egg prototype was presented it as part of the Strangely Familiar exhibit presented by Tecno at the Milan Furniture Fair. Photo by Thomas J Stovicek

	The Egg was made possible with the help of Massimo Banzi, Edoardo Brambilla, Dario Buzzini, Ré Dubhthaigh, Heather Martin, Gianluca Martino, Simone Muscolino, Alie Rose and Yaniv Steiner.